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Nokia's next Windows Phone, the Lumia 900, was made available for pre-orders today, with British punters able to pick one up free on contracts starting from £36 a month.
The Finnish firm's third Windows Phone 7 handset bulks out the battery from 1450mAh to 1830mAh and ups the screen size …

Re: I don't understand... @Spearchucker Jones

Re: I don't understand...

'Can someone please explain to me why the WinPho UI does not seem to fit on the screen?'

It's there to tell the user that not everything in this 'hub' is visible at the moment, if the user swipes to the right, the rest of the label and whatever is lurking over there comes into view. I quite like it as an approach for putting lots of content on a small screen, but until you see it move it really does look odd.

Re: I don't understand...

It is a user experience hint that you should swipe that way to see other app pages/panels. Apps are actually a long string of panels next to each other that you swipe through, and long titles can span across more than one.

Ooh!

I've been tempted ever since I saw a scathing review on an Apple FanBoy site; my immediate thoughts were, if Apple Fans are worried it must be something special... The more I look into it the more I want one, and that's not just because it isn't an iPhone.

Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague

As beautiful as the phone is, and it is beautiful, it's only as good as the OS. WinPhone is nothing more than a beta product right now.

Fat fingers? Get used to QWERTY keyboard as there's no old skool phone keypad keyboard available.

Crap speller? Buy a pocket dictionary. Whilst Android allows some form of guess work for those words that bamboozle you, don't expect the same courtesy in WinPhone. Sure you can spell tomorrow with the occasional wrong letter... But only if said wrong letter is next to the correct (i.e. E instead of R)

Nosey girlfriend? You're fucked if you get a text as she happens to be looking at your phone. There's no option to turn off message notifications. There's no decent SMS apps available either.

Auto time? Nope. Manual. Although it does adjust for BST, it'll only give you the extra hour. If your clock is wrong it'll stay wrong until you manually correct it.

Email search? Sure. But only if you download your entire email inbox. Searching passed 7 days is impossible unless all your mail items are available. On your phone.

Background data usage? Expect a big bill if you go abroad. I turned mine on whilst out of the country to retrieve an email. Whatever the phone did during the 10 minutes or so data was turned on cost me 6mb of data usage. Emails only download header information and blank text until you hit "download images", that's a lot of data going somewhere.

Copy and paste functionality? Crap.

Big gamer? £2.29 is the standard Xbox game price, £5.49 for Pacman. There's no Cut The Rope or Words With Friends/Hanging With Friends or Angry Birds Seasons/Rio to name but a few.

Customisable? 8 colours in which to use for your tiles. And that's it. Big shortcuts. in 8 colours.

As a fan of xbox gaming, the achievements are the only thing keeping me on this phone, I miss almost everything about Android. I'm holding out for Tango, if it's rubbish I'm moving back to HTC.

Re: Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague

Im sorry you feel that way, Tango wont bring you much either, im using a pre release version just now and its minimal, so to save you some stress and some work for your fingers typing all that in the future, ill take it off you hands for a few quid, id swap it with my HD2 that will happily run Android on it but hasn't done since I removed it and installed WP. But I wont, Id like the HD2 to go back to WM 6.5 in such a case.

WP is a phone, and its the best phone out there, simple and quick giving you a great overview of all things you deem important in an incredibly quick UI, Android is trying to be a pocket PC an its not bad at it, only its not as good as WM 6.5 in an overall sense, all be it that it has significant UI advantages over WM and modern APP development.

So yes, ill save you some time, don't bother with Tango as you clearly wont like it, ill take it off you hands for a few quid an we'll all be happy

Re: Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague

Re: Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague

Don't know what's wrong with your phone but

1. Tethering, works fine on my HTC Mozart and the Radars we have at work

2. Auto time, Again on my mozart, settings->date+time change set automatically to on.

3. email search, I can directly search the server on my gmail account and my exchange account, but for some reason not my hotmail account so I'm guessing it's a problem with the provider rather than the phone.

Re: Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague

Dazza + Fuzz

Just done some Googling and Nokia's don't have tethering enabled. Yes Win7 supports, no Nokia haven't given it us. However it seems 800's/710's are getting it in a future update and the 900's will have it from the off.

"too ordinary to be a flagship phone for Nokia"

Free Nokia Play with NFC

That would be the NFC enabled Nokia speaker, making full use of the NFC feature that isn't present on the Lumia 900 (or any Windows Phone devices)? But is available on pretty much all of Nokia old and burning platform devices?

It's pairings like this that only serve to highlight the shortcomings of the Lumia 900 and the Lumia hardware in general, thanks to Microsoft being so late to the game and still frantically playing catch-up on the software front.

Nokia are shipping "high-end" hardware they've had to design with one arm tied behind their backs - it must be very frustrating for the Nokia hardware designers when the bar is set so artificially low.

something missing

The glut of posts from supposed Nokia WP7 owners proclaiming how great they are. That viral marketing astroturfing worked wonders with the Xbox360 launch, they sold broken crap to millions of gamers to stupid to understand astroturfing.

It's almost a sensible time in redmond wa, so I predict the astroturfing onslaught anytime soon.

*yawn*

Poor OS design will hold it back

I got given a 710 free and as I'm not tied into a contract I think I have an unbiased view - the interface is sadly crap (irrespective of missing features such as sending movies by SMS).

The screen doesn't fit the content in peculiar places - a good example is the start page - the 7th and 8th tiles are cut off at the bottom even though there is a big black space at the top of the screen. This means any text/image displayed in the live tile just falls off making it unreadable and look incredibly ugly.

Another bad design - email. Unread items in the main list are indicated by the subject in the highlight colour. But open any email and the subject is then in the highlight colour irrespective of the mail being read or unread. This means if you go through emails with next/back you can't tell which are unread. You have to come out and filter unread emails and then read them seperately away from the main flow.

Want to read to someone a number from your contacts? The text size is so small that in anything other than a darkened room I have to press the phone against my face to read the number aloud. Also the live area to call the number is not just the numbers - its the whole empty area to their right up to the edge of the screen. The number of times I've called people when wanting to just scroll up or down is insane.

As is three buttons on the front but none of them wake the phone - I have to fiddle around for the tiny on off button on the top even when it hasn't gone to full lock.

Small problems (and only a few examples of many off the top of my head) but add them all up and the frustrations are bigger than in the more mature Android or iOS. They are also easily fixed - but will they? I fear they will be retained as the interface feels like it was designed by graphics rather than UI designers. It needs possibly two more iterations before they will be ironed out so my advice - wait until version 8 - Tango looks like it won't fix most major issues and give the missing pieces.

I've said it before, I'll say it again...

Currently own an HTC Trophy (which does everything I ask of it - including some oldschool NES gaming when boredom and rain prevent me from attacking the car in the shed) and I'll consider buying a Lumia 800 (or newer) for the following reasons:

1) Decent GPS maps (maps are downloaded once to the phone and stay there - no vampiring of the mobile data) with Navigation thrown in for free.

HTC recently released a free GPS maps application in which you could download a full set of maps and came with voice navigation - which came as a pleasant surprise until I was informed that HTC hid the fact you need to buy the navigation portion after the free 30 day trial for the navigation portion expires (you have to dig through the menus in the application to spot this fact - otherwise I was blissfully unaware of that snare).

Nokia (being the owners of Navteq - who in turn provide everyone else with their maps and navigation) offer this service for free. Not to be sneezed at when attempting to visit unknown territories (as well as saving a yearly fee).

2) If I get a Nokia - I can make better use of the bluetooth handsfree kit that came with my car.

Given that NZ road rules have the ability to ticket you for more dollars than I'm willing to pay for driving with a cellphone to your ear, the handsfree kit is essential for avoiding fines. Ignoring the phone while driving is my usual stance on the matter, but handsfree has proven useful on more than one occassion - especially when on call and something needs my immediate attention.

3) Compared side-by-side running Mango on a Lumia 800 vs. my current HTC Trophy, there is a visible speed improvement when using the Lumia. This is not really an important point to me, but is still one worth mentioning for those to whom speed matters.

I've got nothing much against the HTC I currently own (current GPS navigation grudge excepted), but the Lumia is a better fit to what I'd like in my portable wallet vampire. :-)

Re: I've said it before, I'll say it again...

I agree with the maps thing - I've not actually tried it yet, but we're off to Norway in a month so hopefully it comes in handy! Anything that doesn't sap data is a bonus considering the 'live tiles' and everything else can drink the stuff like water.

Oh, I don't know...

I have a Lumia 800 that I got given for free. It was a gift, and you don't look gift horses in the mouth. So, I stuck a new microsim in and gave it a whirl.

It's okay. It's got some cool embedded features like music search or the quite swish QR code scanner from the 'vision search'. I thought the live tiles would be irritating but for messaging and email, they're fairly cute.

I can understand why people find the keyboard irritating, as it quite small. However, being a woman with fairly small hands, I find it a ton easier than the Android keyboard. I got used to it immediately, instead of struggling with the one on my other half's Galaxy S2.

It's not worth the 'upgrade' to the 900, but it's a nice alternative to an older Android. If you can get it free on a cheap contract, it would be fine for a non-Android user. But what do I know? I'm interested in the Asus Padfone!

Re: Oh, I don't know...

I got a free Lumia 800 to go along with my free Nokia N950 (MeeGo) - the Lumia 800 sits in a drawer, it's actually not a patch on the N950. The WP UI is text heavy (style very much over function) and the email and twitter/facebook hubs are a mess of text that makes quickly glancing at new information impossible.

Obviously the Lumia has more apps available thanks to Microsoft stuffing the marketplace, but in terms of functionality out of the box, the N950 dumps all over Windows Phone. Of the apps I do want, most are available for MeeGo anyway - there's so much poor quality rubbish in the Windows Phone marketplace.

I suppose if I had no other choice, the Lumia 800 might be an OK phone, but personally I think if I were spending my own money on a new phone, other than an N9 I'd choose an Android device - better hardware, more useful applications and operating system with more conservative design - Microsoft really have tried to be different with the WP UI and I think for some (such as myself) it's a disaster.

Hobbled by OS

I'd agree that the 900 is hobbled by it's OS.

It's supposed to be the top of the range, but it's got a single-core processor, 800x480 display and no micro-SD slot - all limitations imposed by the OS. £460 is way too much for those specs, an Experia S is £80 less.

Sad, used to love Nokia

Like the look of this, particualrly the nice large 4.3" screen in white but having used WinPho 7.5 for six months, I could never bring myself to go back. Like folks have said it's the small, minor shit that kills you in every day use. None of them is spectactularly bad (like clicking mute on the screen doesn't mute the microphone when headphones are plugged in) but together they just annoy the hell out of you every day. And I think the waste of screen real estate by the UI is criminal, and even worse is the crappy implementation of portrait/landscape switching that doesn't work more than half the time. Another 18 months and WinPho might be quite good, not sure if that's too far for Nokia though and I certainly won't be paying £36 per month to do their beta testing for them :(